Assets (e.g. products, merchandise, people, etc.) often need to be tracked within buildings for a variety of reasons ranging from, but not limited to, maintaining premises security, managing inventory, or gauging productivity. In some cases such assets may become lost or stolen in which case it is currently difficult to effectively and efficiently determine the movement history and last known location of a particular asset.
Currently some buildings and complexes may try to solve the problem by implementing massive video surveillance systems to track assets. While these surveillance systems may constantly record activity they however may not be optimized for or able to identify critical events that require the attention of personnel. Thus such systems lead to wasted resources because in some instances hundreds of CTV feeds may have to be monitored at any time, which can cause low overall monitoring efficiency and quality. Further a lack of filtering for specific events over a video feed can lead to longer response times for security personnel in the event of a security issue.
In other instances some buildings and complexes may implement passive RFID or barcode tracking systems in order to track assets. However these systems are heavily dependent on the proper scanning of each item and its corresponding tag at various checkpoints through out the assets journey from point “A” to point “B”. While such systems may able to tell when an item has left point “A” and arrived at point “B” they provide no awareness as to where the asset may be while it is traveling between said checkpoints.
While many buildings currently incorporate an array of systems for building automation and the monitoring of assets, there is still a great need for providing effective and efficient location awareness while tracking asset.